The Question
After I had finished watching John Wick: Chapter 4 (you can check my review of the movie), slightly sleepy and slightly hungry at 1:00 AM, my ears fell on a conversation between a couple.
“That felt like a long movie. What’s the time?“
“1:00 AM.“
“Good God! 3 hours. Did it need to be that long?“
I didn’t feel the length of the movie during its runtime, but my mind did wonder what scenes could have been cut after I overheard that conversation. This wasn’t the first time that my mind did this either.
In recent times, audiences are complaining about the length of some movies, at least online. The latest flashpoint (okay, that is an exaggeration) is Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer clocking a runtime of 3 hours. While there were fans that were happy about the runtime, some were apprehensive about it. Some cited John Wick 4’s runtime as a reason that they didn’t want to watch the movie. So my question was this.
Have these movies gotten needlessly long or has our attention span gotten mercilessly short? Or is it just another day of the Internet overreacting to mundane stuff?
The History
Some of history’s best movies have come close to or even breached the three-hour mark. Notable examples are Seven Samurai, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather Part II, etc. All of these movies are lauded as exemplars of the film industry and last I checked, no one complained about the length of these movies either.
That’s not to say that people don’t give a thought to the runtime at all. A good deal of people won’t mind that runtime for a well-paced, action-packed movie like Mission Impossible, Avengers: Endgame or John Wick. Not everyone can sit through a three hour movie about the misery of the human condition or the decaying of a marriage. So people usually don’t see it in theatres and, if word of mouth for that movie was good, wait for the digital release (or streaming)
While the rise of social media and short form video apps has indeed reduced our patience and attention span for the three hour movie, laying it all at the feet of social media is disingenuous. There are other issues at play besides “people lack the patience to appreciate art”.
My Two Cents
People don’t care about the runtime if the movie can effectively use that length without bogging down the pace. Take the recent Avatar movie. At three hours and twelve minutes, the movie was memed and ripped to shreds for presuming that people would sit that long for a sequel to a movie no one cares about.
Well, the kids in my movie theatre didn’t mind it one bit. They liked that movie, even the National Geographic portion of the movie where Sam and his family settle in the new place and learn the water tribe’s culture (The brats were going gaga for that Payakan whale). The audience liked it, even if just for the graphics. That movie made $2 billion and counting.
Another example that I’ll probably be ripped to shreds for is Zack Snyder’s Justice League. ZSJL was even longer at 4 hours and, considering the drama surrounding the entire affair, was ripped apart online before its release. But people liked it. Heck, even critics who found Snyder’s movies and the DCEU in general insufferable liked it. While that movie could have easily been made into a three hour movie (Snyder being needlessly excessive as always), as it is, it was received well.
When a movie’s writing, screenplay & pacing are wonky, even a 60-minute movie can feel like an eternity. A recent example that comes to my mind is Marvel’s The Eternals. While a touch shorter than my previous examples at 2 hours and 37 minutes, the movie’s screenplay was too aloof and the pacing was weird that even that relatively short runtime felt like an eternity. Fans were saying that Eternals could have benefitted from being a series than a feature film since it was introducing lots of new characters. If Kurosawa could do a masterful job with Seven Samurai, no reason why Eternals couldn’t.
The Response
So.
Were movies getting needlessly long? Not really. There are shorter movies.
Were people losing patience? Maybe. Maybe not.
Is this just a case of the Internet making a mountain out of a molehill? Possibly. It’s the Internet after all. It’ll probably find some other topic to froth over.